Education is in a state of flux – transitioning from traditional architectures and practices to new ecologies of teaching and learning influenced by the tremendous social and technological changes of our times. What changes are afoot today in workplaces, civic life and everyday community life? What are their implications for education? What are the possible impacts of contemporary social transformations on teaching and learning - including in the areas of technology, media, globalization, diversity, changing forms of work in the “knowledge society”, and, in these contexts, changing learner needs and sensibilities? This course explores three pedagogical paradigms: “didactic”, “authentic” and “transformative” learning. It takes an historical perspective in order to define the contemporary dimensions of what we term “new learning”. It prepares participants to make purposeful choices and link particular theories/instructional approaches to individual and group learning goals.

KW

GR

Aug 30, 2019

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Very good class from experts in the field - thumbs up!

À partir de la leçon

Module 4: Transformative Education - New Learning

In the final module of this course, we will be considering prospects for the future of education, imaging a "new learning" based on a repertoire of moves drawn from the didactic and authentic pedagogies. What does transformative education mean, in theory as well as in practice?

Enseigné par

Dr William Cope

Professor

Dr Mary Kalantzis

Professor

Transcription

What we've been doing here is looking at paradigms of education, models of education, patterns of education. And we've been doing them in a kind of a historical way. So, the first modern form of education, as in mass institutionalized formal education, education has been around forever of course. But the first modern form, institutional form, we've called Didactic Pedagogy. And then what we see emerging sometime really at the turn of the 20th century and becoming quite an influential voice in the 20th century is another type of pedagogy that we've called Authentic Pedagogy. Sometimes it's called Progressivism, but we've used this word authentic to try and describe some aspects of that pedagogy. Now we want to talk about another model, another paradigm, another phrase and look we're a little bit lost for words about what to call this new phrase and we struggle with the words. So, in Marion and my writing at various times we've used slightly different terminology. We have a book called New Learning, which talks about contemporary forms of learning which are different from didactic pedagogy and somewhat different also from progressivism or authentic pedagogy. But anyway, new learning doesn't sort of silo really. It just says it's new. It's not what it was in the past. And so some other terminology that we've used to try and grapple with this idea of what might be different, what might be new, is transformative pedagogy. And what we mean by transformative is pedagogy which really, really effectively impact on students lives and which have some impact on the world as well. And we've also used the word reflexive to talk about pedagogies which are much more interactive, which are much more responsive in terms of giving learners feedback, which don't just involve the classical sort of spreading out of content, the wheel and the hub and spoke kind of model where it textbooks and teaches transmitting content, but involve a lot of interaction, a lot of engagement on the part of learners. So, there are some of the connotations that we have around the word reflexive. So anyhow, we're talking about this kind of third model. And one of the funny things about model building is that in fact we live in a world where we have moments of all of this stuff going on and it's a rough historical progression but today there are aspects of all pedagogies which we find in our own practices and around us. And sometimes there's nothing wrong with older practices for particular places and particular times, so what we live with is a lot of complexity. But nevertheless in model building, what we try to build is characteristic forms, ideal types for the purposes of interpretation of a world which is messy and which is complicated. Why do we need a new learning? Why do we need to be talking about another model of pedagogy beyond progressivism, beyond didactic pedagogy? Well, part of the reason has to be contextual. We're in a world where there are extraordinary changes going on and in some senses the old pedagogies are becoming anachronistic, they're becoming irrelevant, they're becoming disconnected from the world we live in. And some of the aspects of those changes include technologies. And it's not just the technologies that we can use for learning, like e-learning technologies, but also the technologies which are in pervasively part of everyday lives called digital media, new media, the Internet. And also the technologies of work which have become a lot of jobs labor saving, increase the ante in those jobs in terms of the level of human capacities that are required. So technologies are having these extraordinary changes in our lives. And the question then is, are these all the forms of pedagogy appropriate given this technological context that we're in? Another huge change that's going on is the phenomenon of globalization, and also the phenomenon of diversity. So globalization itself is sort of not new in a way. I mean you could say that imperialism from the 17th century through the 20th century was a form of globalization. So there have been other waves of globalization. But what's interesting about this wave is the level of deep integration. We can click on a link and be on a web site anywhere in the world in a flash, we can get on a plane and be anywhere in the world in 24 hours. And what we have is extraordinary human movement as a consequence of that in our classrooms and in our communities. So the other side of this coin is an unprecedented need to deal with diversity, global diversity, but also the local diversity that globalization brings with it. So diversity issues have become very, very important. In the past, particularly with didactic pedagogy, we tried to pretend that diversity wasn't there and we just going to ignored it, we just kind of simply talked to the middle class, have everybody the same, try and make the class the same by the way by excluding some people, including others, make the classes merge as possible. But now diversity is something which is just an integral part of our existence. And in fact there's a moral, political, social, ethics that go with the reality of diversity as well which include tolerance and working together productively and constructively, recognizing and respecting each other's differences. So that's a big change. But even deeper is something that I would call changing patterns of human subjectivity. So, when I talk about that in discussing this, I want to use the phrase the balance of agency. So, here is the balance of agency classically in all the modernity. The newspaper is written by journalists and an audience reads the newspaper. So journalists create knowledge, we consume it. That in workplaces there was a hierarchy and the boss handed down the orders and you did as you were told. In citizenries, there was the idea of a universal individual and we would all be loyal citizens. Some of the 20th century states that did that rigorously were pretty unpleasant states, otherwise known as on the left Communism on the right fascism. A whole pile of authoritarian states were around in that time. And we as citizens either literally were forced to do things or we learned to do as we were told in a society where it was a shame we're all much the same. So, there were the patterns of subjectivity in the 20th century, very much relationships of command and compliance. Now what we have in the 21st century is a whole pile of changes. By the way two edged swords. All sorts of problems with these changes but they're big changes. So if you take the social media for example, I can post things. The news might be the meal I had today or I might be near some newsworthy event and my little video I took on my phone might become the news. But in any event, comparing the traditional newspaper to the social media it's dialogical, I'm writing as much as I'm reading. In workplaces, there's a whole lot of rhetoric now about participation, responsibility, teamwork, where sure the boss still owns the show or someone owns the show and you have to do what you're told. But greater responsibility is put on you to be an agent. The key word here is agency. And likewise in citizenship, those strong states, those authoritarian states have gone away. In fact there are a lot of places, it feels like the state is disappearing, the tax revolt and a phenomenon called neoliberalism. So there's a whole lot of places where the state is getting smaller and increasingly you got to fend for yourself. There's increasing expectations about citizenship and responsibility in voluntary organizations, in communities so citizenship becomes much more dispersed. We can have a whole theory of what's going on in each of these spaces but our overarching theory is what we call a shift in the balance of agency. And in a positive construction it might be called participatory, more participatory society. It might be called society where there's more responsibility. It might also be called the society where the state doesn't care much anymore and you're on your own and there isn't the kind of welfare services that were in the past are no longer there. So, there are a lot of changes going on then. Now what are we do in schools? Well, in fact didactic pedagogy with the teacher at the center was a classic case of command the compliance, except around learning and knowledge. So, what we have now how do we build pedagogies which align more effectively with the sensibilities of the present where students are actively participating in their own learning? One final thing I would like to mention is what I call equity agendas. So this in a way has become more important in education than ever in the past. So in a way earlier modern education was deliberately inequitable. It was a sorting mechanism where if you were very good, you could thank your own ability. And if everyone else didn't do very well and therefore you blame your own ability for the reason why you don't get a decent job and other people become rich kind of thing. So, in other words in a way the classic didactic pedagogy aligned quite well and quite functionally with a society with endemic inequality. And a whole lot of sociologists the 20th century wrote about this phenomenon so often in a quite fatalistic kind of way. Perhaps one of the most famous books in the genre was Bowles and Gintis, a book called Schooling in Capitalist America, which basically said how schools reproduced inequality.